The Burrow: Posthumously Published Short Fiction

by Franz Kafka

  In this respect, until recently at least, it seemed not much less understanding than our women. What dangers does it have to fear? Who intends it any harm? And hasn’t it lived for many years in a completely self-contained way? The men aren’t bothered by its presence, and the majority of the women would probably be disappointed if it disappeared. And since it’s the only animal in the building, it hasn’t any natural enemies. It could have seen that over the course of the years. And while the religious service with all its noise may be very alarming to the animal, it is replayed day after day in a moderate way, heightened on the holy days, but always regularly and without interruption. Even the most timid animal should have been able to get used to it by now, particularly if it saw that it’s not the sound of pursuers, but a noise that doesn’t concern it at all. And still the fear. Is it the memory of times long gone, or a presentiment of times to come? Does this old animal perhaps know more than the three generations that foregather in the synagogue each time?

  Many years ago, apparently, attempts were made to drive the animal away. Perhaps they were, but more likely it’s just a story. What can be confirmed, though, is that we made inquiries whether it was permissible, from the point of view of religious law, to tolerate such an animal in the house of God. Views from various prominent rabbis were solicited, opinions differed, the majority were in favour of expulsion and the re-consecration of the house of God, but that was more easily said than done – in reality it was impossible to drive the animal away.

  Once Upon a Time There Was a Game …

  Once upon a time there was a game of patience and dexterity, not much bigger than a pocket watch, and without any sensational innovations. Various grooves had been etched in blue in the russet-coloured wooden surface, culminating in a small hollow. The ball, which was also blue, was by angling and shaking to be got first into one of the grooves and then ultimately into the hollow. Once the ball was in the hollow, the game was over, and if you wanted to play it again, you merely had to give the toy a shake. The whole thing was covered by a stout piece of convex glass; you could keep the game in your pocket and carry it with you wherever you were going, and could take it out at will and play it.

  When the ball was otherwise unengaged, it mostly wandered about, with its hands behind its back, over the high ground, avoiding the paths. It was of the view that it was sufficiently tormented by the paths when the game was in progress, and it had rights, during such time as it wasn’t, to re-create itself on the open plains. It had rather a rolling gait, and claimed it wasn’t really well suited to the narrow paths. This was partially true, it did indeed have trouble gripping the paths, but it was also untrue, because in fact it was very carefully adapted to the breadth of the paths, though they weren’t to be too comfortable, because then the game would have involved little patience and no dexterity.

  Investigations of a Dog

  How my life has changed, and in other ways, hardly at all! When I remember the times when I was still living in the midst of dogs, taking part in everything that concerned them – a dog among dogs – I do find on closer examination that there was always something not quite right about the picture, a little breach or rupture; a mild unease would befall me at the heart of the most respected tribal occasions, yes, sometimes even in intimate settings; no, not just sometimes, but very often, the sight of a dear fellow dog, his mere aspect, somehow seen afresh, could make me embarrassed, shocked, alarmed – yes, even desperate. I tried to calm myself, friends I discussed it with helped me, quieter times came along, times that were not free of such surprises either, only they were accepted in a spirit of greater equanimity, were more casually absorbed into the tissue of life; perhaps they made me sad and tired, but they allowed me to continue to exist as a perhaps somewhat aloof, reserved, frightened, calculating, but all in all regulation dog. How – without these pauses for refreshment – could I ever have reached my proud age; how could I have forced my way through to the calm with which I observe the terrors of my youth and bear the terrors of my seniority; how could I ever have learned to draw the correct conclusions from my admittedly unhappy or, putting it more cautiously, not so terribly happy constitution and live almost entirely by their light? Withdrawn, solitary, entirely taken up with my small, hopeless but – to me – indispensable inquiries, that’s how I live, but in so doing I never lost sight of my people from a distance, often news of them reached me, and from time to time I let them hear of my doings. I am treated with respect – they don’t understand my way of living, but they don’t hold it against me and even young dogs I see running by in the distance from time to time, a new generation, whose infancy I can barely recall, do not deny me a respectful greeting.

  It would be wrong to suppose that, for all my – all too apparent – eccentricities, I have completely lost touch with the species. If I think about it, and I have the time and inclination and capacity to do so, we dogs are an odd lot. Apart from ourselves, there are many other creatures round about – poor, inadequate, mute beings, restricted to the odd squawk at best – we have studied them, given them names, tried to help them along, to ennoble them, and so on and so forth, but to me, so long as they don’t bother me, they are a matter of indifference. I get them mixed up or ignore them, but one thing remains too striking for me ever to forget it, and that is how little, compared to us dogs, they consort, how they pass by one another like strangers, how they have neither high nor low interests in common, how on the contrary any interests they have seem to drive them further apart than they already are. Whereas we dogs! One may surely say that we live in a pack, all of us, however different we may be in terms of the innumerable and profound distinctions that have arisen between us over the ages. All one pack! We are impelled to be together, and nothing can prevent us from satisfying that urge; all our laws and institutions, the few I still know, and the numberless ones I have forgotten, they all go back to the greatest happiness that exists for us, our warm companionableness. And now the obverse. No creature to the best of my knowledge lives in such a dispersed way as we dogs, none has so many, so impossibly many differences of kind, of breed, of occupation. We, who want to be together – and repeatedly we are able to, at moments of exaltation – we of all creatures live remote from one another, in curious callings, which are often hard for the dog next door to understand, clinging to regulations that are not of our making – yes, that seem, if anything, to be directed against us. These are such difficult matters, matters one would prefer not to interfere with – I understand such a point of view, understand it better than my own – and yet I have allowed them to govern my life. Why do I not do as others do, live in harmony with my people, and accept in silence what disturbs the harmony, ignore it like a small error in a large reckoning, and keep my eye on the thing that links us happily together, not that which repeatedly and irresistibly rips us out of our community. …

  I remember an incident from my youth. I was in one of those inexplicable states of blissful excitement that we probably all experience as children – I was still a very young dog, liking everything, attached to everything. I believed that great things were happening around me, whose focus I was, to which I needed to lend my voice, things that would be condemned to lie languishing on the ground if I didn’t run on their behalf, swing my body around for them – childish fantasies that recede over the years, but at that time they were very strong, I was wholly in thrall to them – and then something quite extraordinary happened, which seemed to confirm these wild expectations of mine. Intrinsically it was nothing extraordinary, and later on I saw such things, and others, still stranger, quite regularly, but at the time it struck me with a primal, powerful, indelible impression that set the tone for much that followed. I encountered a small group of dogs, or rather I didn’t encounter them, they approached me. I had then been running around for a long time in the dark, with a presentiment of great things, a presentiment that was a little misleading admittedly, because it was always with me. I had long been running through the darkn
ess, this way and that, guided by nothing but a vague yearning, then suddenly I stopped with the sense that I was in the right place, I looked up, and it was a full dazzling day, with just a little heat-haze. I greeted the morning with confused sounds, then – just as if I had summoned them – from some darkness there emerged into the light with grotesque noise the like of which I had never heard, seven dogs. Had I not clearly seen that they were dogs, and that they were accompanied by their noise – though I was unable to see quite how they managed to produce it – I would have run off; but as it was, I stayed put.

  At that time I understood almost nothing about the musicality exclusive to our species, it had managed to escape my burgeoning attention so far; there had been vague attempts to point me towards it, nothing more, and so much the more astonishing, yes, positively overwhelming was the impression made on me by these seven artistes. They didn’t speak, they didn’t sing, they tended to silence almost with a certain – forgive me – doggedness, but from empty space they contrived to conjure up music. All was music. The picking up and setting down of their feet, certain anglings of the head, their running and resting, the positions they took up towards one another, the recurring associations they entered with one another, with one, say, resting his forepaws on another’s back, and then all seven performing this same action, so that the first bore the weight of all the others, or the way their bodies creeping low to the ground made tangled forms – never erring, not even the last of them who was still a little unsure of himself and didn’t straightaway find the connection to those ahead of him, so to speak, in striking the tune, sometimes missed a cue, but that was only by comparison to the great certainty of the others, and even had his own relative uncertainty been far greater, a complete uncertainty, it would not have managed to spoil anything, while the others, the great masters, imperturbably kept the beat. But then I hardly saw them, I could hardly take them in. They had stepped forth. I had privately greeted them as dogs, though of course I was greatly confused by the sound that accompanied them, but they had to be dogs, dogs like me and you. I looked at them through the eyes of habit, like dogs one might meet on the street. I felt like approaching them, for an exchange of greetings: they were very near to me, dogs a lot older than I was and not of my long-haired woolly kind, but nor were they that alien to me either in form and stature – they seemed somehow familiar, I knew many of their sort or similar sorts, but while I was still caught up in these reflections, the music gradually took over, veritably taking possession of me, pulling me away from these actual little dogs, quite against my will; in fact, while I was resisting it with all my might, howling like a dog in pain, I was permitted to occupy myself with nothing else but the music that came at me from all sides – from the heights, from the depths, from everywhere, taking the listener in its midst, flooding him, crushing him, even as he was annihilated, in such proximity that it felt remote, like barely audible fanfares in the distance. And then I was let go, because I was too exhausted, too destroyed, too weak to be able to hear; I was released, and I saw seven little dogs in a procession, doing their leaps. I felt like calling out to them, however disdainful they looked, to ask them for a lesson, ask them what they were doing here – I was a child after all, and thought I had a right to put my questions to all and sundry – but no sooner had I begun, no sooner had I felt the good familiar doggish connection with the seven than the music returned and drove me wild. I walked around in small circles, as though I myself was one of the musicians, whereas I was only their victim, flung myself this way and that, begging for mercy, and finally saved myself from its power only because it had forced me against a tangle of boards that seemed to have risen up in that place, without my having noticed it before, and now I was caught fast in it, it pressed my head down and, while the music was still thundering on in the open, made it possible for me to pause and catch my breath.

  Truly, though, more than the artistry of the seven dogs – which was baffling to me, but also wholly impossible to account for, so totally beyond anything I knew – I was surprised at their courage in giving themselves over so wholly and openly to what they were producing, and at their strength to bear it so calmly, without it breaking their backs. I now began to see, on closer inspection from my little vantage point, that it wasn’t so much calm as intense concentration with which they were working. Those apparently so securely stepping feet were in a continual fearful tremor; they looked at each other seemingly rigid with despair, and their tongues, which they made constant efforts to control, would then hang slackly from their muzzles. It couldn’t be doubt of success that came over them; anyone who dared such a thing, or was capable of creating work of that order, surely couldn’t be afraid. What was there for them to fear? Who compelled them to do what they were doing?

  I was unable to restrain myself any longer, particularly once they seemed to me quite bafflingly in need of help, and so through all the noise I called out my questions loudly and peremptorily. They, though – baffling, baffling! – made no reply and ignored me, a breach of manners that under no circumstances is allowed the smallest or the greatest dog. So were they not dogs after all? But how could they not be dogs? Now, as I listened more closely, I heard the quiet words of encouragement they called to one another, pointing out difficulties ahead, warning each other of mistakes. I saw the least little dog, who was receiving the most calls, often squint in my direction, as though he wanted very badly to answer me, but was forcing himself not to, because he wasn’t allowed. But why was it not allowed, how could the very thing that our laws unconditionally demand on this occasion not be permitted? My heart was outraged; I all but forgot the music. These dogs were in breach of the law. Great and magical artists they might be, but the law applied just as much to them, even as a child I understood that. And from then on I observed more and more. They really had good reason to be silent, assuming they were silent out of guilt. Because in the way they were carrying on – the music had blinded me to it so far – they had left all modesty behind: the wretches were doing the most ridiculous and obscene thing, they were walking upright on their hind legs. Faugh! They bared themselves, and exposed their nakedness to full view; they were proud of themselves and if they once obeyed a better impulse and dropped down onto their front legs, they positively shrank as though that had been a mistake, as though the whole of Nature was a mistake, and quickly lifted up their feet again. Their expression seemed to be asking forgiveness for briefly having interrupted their sinfulness.

  Was the world out of kilter? Where was I? What had happened? At this point, for the sake of my own being, I could no longer hesitate. I freed myself from the embrace of the planks, leapt out with a single bound and made for the dogs – I, a little pupil, was called upon to be a teacher. I had to make them understand what they were doing, and keep them from further sin. ‘Such old dogs, such old dogs!’ I kept tutting away to myself. But no sooner was I free, and there were just two or three paces between me and them, there was the noise again, reasserting its sway over me. Perhaps in my zeal I could have overcome it this time, since I knew it better now, had it not been for the fact that in all its terrible but still resistible polyphony, a clear, stern, constant and unvarying tone was coming at me from ever so far away – perhaps it was the actual melody in the midst of the noise – that forced me to my knees. Oh, what beguiling music these dogs could make. I couldn’t go on, I no longer wanted to lecture them; let them sprawl with their feet apart, commit sins and lead others to the sin of quiet spectating. I was such a small dog – who could demand something so difficult of me? I made myself even smaller than I was already, I whimpered, if the dogs had stopped and asked me for an opinion then, I might very well have agreed with them. In any case, it didn’t go on for very much longer, and they disappeared with all their sound and light into the darkness from which they had sprung.

  As I say, there was really nothing remarkable about the whole incident; in the course of a long life you will experience many things that, taken out of context a
nd viewed through the eyes of a child, will be much more remarkable. And then, too, one can of course – as the expression goes – talk anything up. All that happened was that seven musicians had met to make music on a quiet morning, and a small dog had blundered upon them, an irritating spectator whom they tried, unfortunately in vain, to drive away by especially terrible or especially elevated music. If his questions were bothersome to them, were they, irked already by the mere presence of the stranger, to respond to this nuisance and add to it by providing answers? And even if the law instructs us to give answers to everyone, is such a tiny stray so-and-so even to be termed as anyone? Maybe they couldn’t understand him; presumably he was lisping out his questions in a way that was hard to understand. Or perhaps they understood him perfectly well and mastered themselves to the extent of providing answers, but he, the little fellow, unused to music, couldn’t tell the answers from the music. And as far as the business with the hind legs goes, maybe they really only walked like that on a few rare occasions. Yes, of course, it is a sin! But they were alone together – seven of them – a community of friends in the privacy of their own four walls, so to speak; quite alone, if you like, because to be among friends is not like being on public view, and then it takes more than the chance presence of a nosy little street-dog to make an occasion public; therefore, is it not the case instead that nothing really happened? Not quite, perhaps, but very nearly, and the lesson is that parents should keep their little ones from running around so much, and train them to remain silent and respect their elders.